


hello

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 19:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a woman at the grocery store named Evelyn who always rings him up on the days he ventures out for food and she knows him, or likes to think she does. <i>I hope you're not too lonely</i>, she'll say. He chooses not to tell her that his dead brother sleeps at his feet every night. He'd rather not be the cause of her inevitable heart attack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hello

She asks “Is this your first tattoo?” and he tells her no. Flat-out, no embellishments. Gives her a weary smile, half-thinks about pulling down his shirt collar to show her. (It had hurt more, the second time, over burn-scarred skin; but he can’t recall the exact pain just now.)

She looks at the thing he hands her and frowns.

“On my back,” he says. “Just like that.”

“It’ll cost you,” she says.

Just like everything else. “I know,” he says.

She smiles, weakly. Looks down past her inked-up hands and the assemblage of silvery rings on her fingers towards the calendar flipped out, coffee-stained, on the glass countertop.

“Thursday?” she says. “2:30?”

“Suits me just fine,” says Sam.

* * *

 

When he gets home, to the big empty echoing place that is home, he spends some time in the bathroom, shirt off, digging a fingernail into his back as hard as he can. Grimacing. Looking, with detachment, at the crow’s feet that are slipping into the space beside his eyes, and the lines carving themselves into the space around his mouth. The whispy grey hairs he’s been trying to cover up, lately, as best he can.

He digs, arm twisted up behind him, as hard as he can stand, tries to clock and calculate how it feels. Not so bad. He’s had worse. (The second tattoo, the replacement, above his heart, was horrible. Even now it is misshapen. Dean apologised for that, over and over, but Sam always told him, _it’s no big deal. As long as it works, right?_ And he’d privately taken the glimmer of pain on Dean’s face at that and held it in his heart and it had been a good enough apology, after all that time.)

(He no longer remembers what being possessed felt like. It’s been so blessedly long. God, what a mercy.)

“You around?” he calls, when he leaves the bathroom, listening to his voice bounce off the cold walls and back to him. “Dean? I’m back.”

His voice rings around the empty bunker for longer than is probably natural, but he’s used to that by now, used to things not working quite the same way in this place. But the wall sconce on the wall at his left flickers, warmly, and he passes a hand briefly along the bricks beneath it in acknowledgment.

Coffee. Coffee would do him good. Coffee and Celebrex. He’s not taking that often enough and his hands are making him well aware of it. Dean is, too. He keeps finding the bottle on the table in the mornings, staring at him.

On the table there are books, and on every other surface there are more books, and loose papers, and empty pens and unsharpened pencils; he learned too late that the bunker didn’t have a pencil sharpener anywhere, not even the old-fashioned crank-style sharpeners, and he’s developed the habit of running through pencils until they grind down to unusable nubs and discarding them in favor of new ones. There’s no one around to really tell him to do otherwise.

He could buy a pencil sharpener, sure. But it’s not worth the trouble.

Sam sweeps a stack of records to the side to drag the coffee-maker out. Starts it up and leans against the counter, thinking of the half-moon fingernail shapes that are no doubt beginning to bruise on his back by now.

The toaster, to his right, dings, the knob popping upward, though there’s nothing in it. Goosebumps ripple up his bare arm like an errant breeze; Sam smiles.

“I’m coming,” he says, to the empty kitchen. “Be patient, yeah?”

Patience was never Dean’s strong suit, though.

He waits, there—surrounded by the ticking sound of the clock and the hum of the ancient refrigerator, the occasional crackle as the ice-maker inside drops out a load of cubes—until the coffee-maker beeps and gurgles. Pours a mug, almost too full—cream, half a teaspoon of sugar—hesitates with one hand over the bottle of Celebrex on the table before he puts his coffee down, twists it open, knocks back his dose.

The toaster dings again, in approval.

Outside, down the hall, in the library, where the neatly-arranged desks and chairs have all been pushed out of order, their space given over to stacks on stacks of files, upturned boxes, books left open on the floor, Sam climbs over a column of encyclopedias each bigger than his head and carefully, on painful knees, lowers himself onto the cold floor, coffee in hand.

He’d left his Ouija board with the tattoo artist—the familiar one, with all its grooves and its old, smooth-worn wooden planchette—but the Men of Letters were nothing if not hoarders, of everything. It wasn’t hard to find another, in all this _stuff._

Something rustles a stack of papers a little ways away. Sam looks in its direction, raises his eyebrows, takes a long, slow sip of his steaming coffee. The papers move again, annoyed, this time, and he smiles a little.

“Keep your pants on,” he says.

The board on the floor in front of his crossed legs, he thinks, has hardly been used. It looks practically new. It’s not as nice as his—no embellishments in the corners, and it’s missing the sun and moon carved above the _YES_ and _NO_ that always catch his pinkie fingers off the edge of his planchette. But it’ll do.

He holds his coffee in two hands, close to his face, watching it. For a while he’d used the planchette each time—it had felt safer, somehow—but now he waits.

The planchette, sitting in the middle of the board, trembles, and then shoots, of its own accord, towards the space on the board marked _HELLO._

Sam grins.

“Hey, Dean,” he says.

* * *

 

Dean’s not very proud of how he went out. He’s said it enough times, at least. _I    M E A N    P N E U M O N I A ? ? ?_ he spells out, at least once a week.

Sam, privately, is pretty proud, though. Minimal blood and screaming. For a hunter it was a pretty decent exit.

It’s been a year, though you wouldn’t know it, with Dean’s energy the way it is. Still as strong and blustery and talkative as ever. If anything, he’s even less subtle as a ghost than he was in real life—something Sam hadn’t thought possible. But he’s not complaining. Not even a little bit.

They’d discovered the Ouija board about a month after Sam had lit Dean’s pyre on top the high-walled roof of the bunker and watched his ashes get lost in the stars; neither of them know how he’s still around, but it’s not a question they want to beg, either; one day the board that Dad had passed down to them had simply fallen off its shelf in Dean’s empty bedroom and skidded, apparently of its own volition, out the door into the hallway, where Sam had nearly tripped over it in the dark.

It was the first contact Dean had managed to make since he’d gone, and Sam had eaten it up.

Now, Sam thinks, it’s as if he never left at all; as if he’s still there, taking up space, feet up on the tables, getting in Sam’s way, only invisible, now, and mute. Lights flickering and toasters dinging in place of his quips and jokes. He’s gotten used to it. Grown to like it. It’s a lot less lonely than one would think, at the end of the day.

He does feel older, though, now, with his benchmark standard for _old_ gone from the world; he feels more his age than he ever had before. Dean tells him he’s looking fantastic. It’s hard to convey sarcasm through a wooden board, so Sam takes it as a compliment.

Though Dean worries about his hands, the way they’re warping a little at the knuckles. It’s part of the reason they’re doing this—it’s hard to grip the planchette sometimes, for Sam, these days.

“Tattoo appointment tomorrow,” Sam says, the next night, the board balanced on his knees where he’s lying in bed, a novel balanced over his thigh instead of a ledger, for once. “You better hope it works.”

The planchette skids around the board with an ease that always calms Sam’s heart.

_I T   W A S   M Y   I D E A   O F    C O U R S E   I T   W I L L   W O R K_

Sam smiles, closing his book over his finger to keep his place.

_I M   A   G E N I U S_

“Sure.”

_S H U T   U P   S A M_

The planchette races to _GOODBYE,_ petulantly, but Dean’s not gone; Sam can feel him, the cold heavy spot over his feet on the edge of the bed.

He leans over to put the board on the bedside table, opens up his novel again, for a little while longer, at least.

He gets to the end of the chapter before the lamp sputters—Dean’s way of saying _goodnight,_ he’s tired, his energy’s down—and his coldness doesn’t leave when Sam clicks off the light. It’s comforting, almost. Like the weight of a dog on the end of the bed.

There’s a woman at the grocery store named Evelyn who always rings him up on the days he ventures out for food and she knows him, or likes to think she does. _I hope you’re not too lonely,_ she’ll say. (He can’t remember telling her about his brother dying, but he supposes he must have. He likes her. Stooped old thing.) He chooses not to tell her that his dead brother sleeps at his feet every night. He’d rather not be the cause of her inevitable heart attack.

Sam closes his eyes in the pitch-dark, waiting for the burning green of the shut-off lamp to dissipate from behind his eyelids.

Abruptly and only for a moment, there’s a chilly ache against the side of his skull that goes as fast as it comes, and the cold weight on the end of the bed settles down completely, an indent in the mattress. Goodnight kiss.

* * *

 

“I’m Malia,” says the tattoo artist, on Thursday, at 2:30, she of the beringed and inky fingers.

“Sam,” says Sam. He shakes her hand. It feels brittle, as if the rattle of the tattoo gun has made her delicate.

“You know,” she says, while he straddles her chair, shirt off, feeling very exposed to the wide glass window behind him, “I’m kinda surprised you want this thing. I mean, I don’t judge.”

“What? A Ouija board?” He watches her wet her needle and squeezes the chair a little between his thighs. He’d forgotten to remind himself of the pain before he’d come in. He hopes she doesn’t plan to talk the whole time.

“Yeah, dude. I mean, you’re what, like forty?”

“Just about.”

She shakes her head. She’s got a wicked-looking piercing in her purple-painted lower lip. Expertly drawn-on eyebrows. “My grandma, you know, she’s Catholic? Like, Catholic as hell. I don’t even fuck with these things, man. Like, I don’t even do that.”

She shakes her head again, as if to say, _look at me._

The first bite of the needle isn’t as bad as he’d anticipated. He relaxes against Malia’s chair. Her glove catches on his skin from time to time.

She whispers expletives to herself from time to time. Shakes her head. “I mean, I don’t judge,” she says, more than once.

He can tell when she starts on the sun and moon, copied straight off the board—his board—lying among sketch paper and empty ink caps on her table. The needle moves in broad arcs of pain.

“So, like, age-old question,” Malia says, one hand in the small of his back, the other stroking over skin, “I know you must hate it, but I gotta ask—” She laughs, deep pleasant sound. “What’s this for, man? What’s the story? Gotta be a story for something like this.”

Sam turns his head against the headrest of her chair. The pain is making him sweat; his skin sticks to it. If Dean were here, he’d be sitting right here, in his line of sight, making jokes about Sam’s face.

“I’d rather not say,” he says, after a moment.

He’d really rather not. It’s intimate, when he thinks about it. Too intimate to share with anyone.

“Cool, man. Cool. I got you.”

She seems to sense he’s not in a talking mood, so she quiets, keeps working, and he’s grateful for that.

It takes two hours, and when he looks in the mirror, his back is red and angry, but there it is. His board, laid out in neat black ink on his skin.

He reaches back, gingerly touches the fresh _HELLO._

“Keep that clean, you hear?” says Malia.

He tips her far more than he should. He considers telling her, _you don’t know what you’ve done for me,_ but in the end he keeps his silence.

* * *

 

It takes two weeks to heal, and another to memorise, and every day Dean gets more and more impatient. He rattles out questions through Sam’s old familiar planchette, newly in his possession, as if he’s anxious just to _talk._

_H A N D S ?_

“Fine,” says Sam. He holds them up for Dean’s invisible eyes to examine. He can almost feel his brother’s frown, even all the way on the other side of the veil.

 _L O O K I N G   C R O O K E D,_ says Dean.

“Fine, Dean.”

_T A T ?_

For the fiftieth time, Sam shrugs off his T-shirt and waits for the gush of chilly air on his spine that will mean Dean is examining the Ouija board dappled on his shoulders.

_W H E N   C A N   W E—_

_“_ Soon,” Sam says, resting a hand gently on the planchette, a quiet _calm down._ “I wanna be sure I get it memorised. I don’t wanna misread you.”

Dean goes quiet, the planchette still.

“Dean?” Sam says.

Gently the planchette swivels and moves, slowly.

_I   M I S S   Y O U_

“I know,” Sam says, soft. God, he wishes—he wishes there were someone to reach out to, to touch, right now; they had never quite gotten back to their old ways, after everything finally quieted down, after they were both finally and completely human again, after the angels packed it up and the demons went underground, after hunts started going dry in the area the Impala could still cover, at her age. He misses touching Dean—it’s the one thing he misses most—having the ability to rest a hand on his shoulder or his cheek. He misses kissing him.

The planchette goes still again. Sam runs a gentle finger around its edge, feeling the well-worn wood that is becoming, to him, as close to Dean’s skin as he’ll ever get again.

“I miss you too,” he says.

The way Dean says _GOODBYE_ is so melancholy and slow that Sam almost misses it. The room gets warmer; Dean’s off, somewhere, he thinks, haunting one of the back rooms, where he can sulk in silence and privacy.

It’s a question neither of them have found an answer to, yet, even in all of the Men of Letters’ books. Why Dean can’t materialise, can’t show himself, even after all this time. Sam thinks the hunter’s funeral has something to do with it, but he doesn’t know for sure, can’t undo that even if he did know for sure.

It frustrates Dean. Dean, by his own account, wishes to God he could materialise and _stay_ material, _occupy_ the bunker with Sam, until Sam, as he puts it, _F O R G E T S   I M   E V E N   D E A D._ But they’ve tried every trick in every book and they haven’t got it yet.

There’s touch, but it’s not real touch. Kiss, but it’s not real kisses. Just varying degrees of chill and proximity.

Sam reaches a hand back, runs it over the smooth skin of the tattoo; closes his eyes. _YES—_ left shoulder. _NO_ on the right. He feels for his name, _S A M,_ and then for Dean’s, hoping he’s pinpointing the letters correctly.

He’d carved in the _HELLO_ on the board himself. Now it rests on the knob of his spine, emblazoned. The _HELLO_ had hurt the most. Malia’s needle had coursed hard over the bone and he’d had to stop, take a break.

 _GOODBYE_ is easy to find. Center of his spine, center of his back.

He hopes Dean won’t have to use that one very often anymore.

* * *

 

Sam waits until after dark; it just seems right, that way, somehow. If he’s going to feel Dean’s touch for the first time in a year, he wants it to be in the dark.

He doesn’t have to call for Dean this time; Dean’s been following him around all day, like a particularly frozen puppy, and Sam doesn’t miss the sigh of relief that flickers through the wall sconces all down the hall when he finally turns to go into his bedroom.

He knows Dean doesn’t need the light to see him, so he keeps it off. Sits awkwardly on the edge of his bed, staring into the point of black space where Dean is, or might be.

Sam feels a very gentle tug on the bottom of his T-shirt. He takes it off.

A chill up his side, like a cold hand brushing up against it. _Lie down._

He does, face turned against the pillow, stomach against the scratchy woolen blankets he’d taken from Dean’s room after Dean had died, the last things that smelled like him.

He clutches his hand into the them, twisting them tight in his fingers.

“Well,” he says, taking a deep breath. “Say something.”

There is silence—hesitation—he knows Dean’s there; he can feel him hovering above him, behind him, straddling him, even; the small of his back is prickling with goosebumps.

Then, very tentatively, on the knob of his spine—fingers.

 _HELLO,_ they say.

Sam nearly sobs with relief, twisting the blankets even tighter in his hands. God, it’s real—he’d know those fingers anywhere, their bluntness, their thickness, the pads of them—

They hesitate, but they move, eventually, lacking the grace of the planchette but getting the job done.

_D O N T   C R Y   Y O U   B I G   B A B Y_

That almost _does_ make him cry, though he swallows the urge in a laugh, because it almost _tickles,_ freezing skiddy fingers on his skin.

“Jesus,” he says, his laughter wet and warbling. “It’s like Criss-Cross Applesauce.”

_Y O U   R E M E M B E R   T H A T ?_

The question mark—he’d carved that in, too, to give Dean leeway; it’s inked between the alphabet and the numbers, directly over vertebrae. He shivers when Dean lingers there.

“Yeah, dude,” he says, biting down hard on his lip, trying not to let tears slip from the corners of his eyes. He swallows. It’s hard to talk when his mouth is trembling with so much joy. “I remember all that shit.”

Dean is _touching_ him. For the first time in months. He can hardly believe it.

_D U D E   Y O U   A R E   C R Y I N G_

“Shut up, of course I’m crying.”

_W H Y ?_

“You know why,” Sam says, and then he gives up—lets go of the blankets and reaches up to smear the tears away. God, he feels like a fucking idiot. Reduced to snivelling over something like this. He’s been done mourning Dean for almost a year, for Christ’s sake. He feels like laughing and equally like curling into a ball and weeping until he falls asleep.

_D O N T   C R Y_

He feels palms, then, flat palms, on the sun and moon on his shoulders, comforting, steadying, and they stay like that until his lip stops trembling and his tears go cold in the corners of his eyes.

He wants to reach up—wants to see if Dean can take his hand, if he can feel that, too—but that’s almost too much to hope for just yet.

_T A L K   T O   M E_

“I don’t know what to talk about, dude.”

_A N Y T H I N G_

In the library, in his bed, with the board—they’d never really gone anywhere; nowhere besides mundanities, miscellanea. _How’s Cas doing, how’s archiving going, how are your hands feeling._ Dinner table conversation. But here—here Sam almost wants to lose all of that—this is special, this is different.

He hesitates.

“Dean?”

 _YES._ Left shoulder.

“Stupid question—”

Dean’s hand rests on _?._ It’s soft. Reassuring.

“Do you still—”

No, it’s stupid. He won’t ask.

_T E L L   M E_

“You still—love me, right?”

It comes out so whispered it could have been mistaken for breath. But Dean hears everything, these days.

_W H A T   K I ND   O F   A   ?   I S   T H A T_

Chill, ache, on the back of his skull. Kiss.

_O F   C O U R S E   I   D O_

If he didn’t know any better, he would think that the cold wrapping around his chest from behind were arms, that the flush of goosebumps over his back were a body, lying down across his own.

Little dots of frostbite, all over him—Dean’s _kissing_ him. Kissing the letters. Sam has to squeeze his eyes shut tight to keep from dissolving.

_L O V E   Y O U   B A B Y   B R O T H E R_

“I miss you,” Sam says, or whimpers, he’s not sure. It’s all too overwhelming, too soon, too much. “God, fuck, I miss you, Dean—”

_D O N T   F U C K I N G   C R Y   A G A I N   M A N_

Sam laughs, a weird broken sound, but he doesn’t cry. The cold of Dean is—turning over, the way cold sometimes does, into dull, itchy heat; it’s like nothing he’s felt from him before; it’s almost like substance, like weight.

_B E S I D E S   I M   N O T   G O I N G   A N Y W H E R E_

“I know. I know you’re not.”

Dean’s hands go quiet, then—settling on the sun and moon on Sam’s shoulders, instead of letters; Sam thinks he can already see how this will be his habit, like making lamps sputter and toasters ding—hands on the ink, _I’m here, you can feel me._

They stay like that, unmoving, for a long time, until the exhaustion starts to settle into Sam’s bones, his hands begin to cramp, his body feels the impact of how tense he’s been since he lay down like this; he relaxes, as best he can, still blinking old tears out of his eyes, and Dean sits above him, holding his shoulders.

Sam shifts, too aware of the fact that Dean has no weight to shift against.

“Hey,” he says, softly.

_HELLO_

“I’m beat, man.”

_T A K E S   I T   O U T   O F   Y A   I   K N O W_

It’s not teasing; it’s just true.

Sam looks into the blackness in the room; it’s so easy to imagine that Dean is in all of it, immaterial, spread out like diffused atoms, just as much the blackness against the wall as the blackness against his face—every molecule on his skin a kiss; and those cold bracing hands against his back. They’re so _real_.

“Will you stay until I fall asleep?”

Dean never leaves when he’s asleep anyway, but he wants it differently this time—wants Dean to touch him until the sun comes up, to lie at his back and cup his shoulders in his hands—Dean seems to get the drift.

_O F   C O U R S E_

It’s cliché, Sam knows. But there’s no one around to point it out, and like hell is he giving this up for anyone.

* * *

 

The alarm on Sam’s phone goes off, as it does every morning, at 6 AM, and for a moment he lies there, on his side, bare skin still rippling with goosebumps, letting the blue light of his phone cast over his face.

He waits, for a minute, breath bated—suddenly, crazily unsure that last night had been real, that it had all worked out.

 _HELLO,_ say the fingers at the nape of his neck.

Sam’s eyes flutter closed, and he breathes.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my sweet friend Penny. <3


End file.
